Threats keep getting through, and it’s time for a new approach
Headline after headline point to the fact that organizations across every sector continue to get hit by attackers. There is a never-ending list of ways in which malicious actors are able to gain access and then cause damage to these organizations, disrupting operations or exfiltrating proprietary data that further exploits their victims.
This is despite the fact that organizations continue to deploy numerous cybersecurity measures to try and thwart attackers. Off the cuff, the list of approaches and solutions to try to prevent an attack from happening or doing damage is long: employee education programs, email filters, identity access management (IAM) programs, multi-factor authentication (MFA), restricted or need-to-know access, data encryption, vulnerability fixes and software updates, endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems, behavioral analysis, network traffic analysis across physical, virtual/cloud, and SaaS systems. You may even be reading this and are thinking, “Well, what about ___?”.
All of these approaches work in their own regard. And my point here is not to say these don’t work. Rather, they are all needed in different capacities to try to mitigate attacks and lower the risk of cyber threats. But, threats continue to slip through the cracks.
New approaches and additional capabilities are needed in order for today’s security teams to effectively detect and respond to the latest attacks. Just as the attackers continue to change their tactics and tools to avoid/evade detection, so must the folks who are trying to defend their organizations.
Attackers will try to find a way
Attackers are relentless in finding ways to “get in.” They’re very good at going after the human vector, which is often the weakest. Once they’re in, they often use some pretty nifty obfuscation techniques or hijack legitimate files (LOL’bins or LOTL). But once they are in, how can you better detect and respond faster to limit damage?
So, once they are in, how can you better detect and respond faster to limit damage? How do you find malware that was skillfully hidden, creeping past the tools – like your EDR – that you already have in place?
I’m so glad you asked.
It’s time to switch things up at the binary level
When you’re looking at the binary level of each file, there is no place for the malware to hide. Think of it like getting to the DNA level of a file – no matter what you do to try to disguise the look and feel of the file, the DNA does not lie. When analyzing the binary level of a file with advanced static and dynamic analysis (say from Stairwell), you are then able to quickly and accurately determine if the file is malicious and identify variants that you weren’t even aware of.
Stairwell provides defenders with the technology and a cutting-edge approach that allows them to get ahead of the attackers. With Stairwell, your SOC, threat hunters, and IR teams are able to automate a large portion of their efforts in detecting and responding to even the most advanced attacks.
Stairwell is able to do this by automatically ingesting and storing every executable or executable-like file written to disk, in perpetuity. As a result, Stairwell is able to provide our customers with a comprehensive dataset for identifying current threats as well as attacks which have taken place in the past. Applying advanced and groundbreaking technology, Stairwell detects the presence of malware and variants of malware – now or ever in the past since becoming a Stairwell customer, allowing your security teams to stay ahead of threats and respond accordingly. By focusing on files as the true source of threats, Stairwell enables customers to quickly detect and respond to APTs, supply chain attacks, and other sophisticated threats.
Stairwell’s new approach to stopping attacks and finding threats missed by others involves:
- Analyzing every executable or executable-like file at the binary level
- Continuous threat analysis on every file, current and from the past
- Automatically ingesting every threat feed, analyzing across your environment in seconds with static & dynamic analysis
- Automatically assessing the severity of malware
- Uncovering unknown threats and variants
When you mix in the fact that Stairwell offers standard unlimited retention and cloud-based compute power to conduct unlimited YARA queries, you will be able to answer the question, “Have we ever been impacted?” with confidence and within a matter of seconds.
Learn more about how you or your security team can stay ahead of the latest threats and how Stairwell is able to turn them into legendary defenders.
